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Lotus Cars

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Lotus Cars is a British manufacturer of sports and racing cars based at Hethel, England. The company is famous for designing and building landmark race and production automobiles of extremely light weight and possessing legendary handling characteristics.

The company is based in East Anglia and was originally formed as Lotus Engineering Ltd. by the influential engineer Colin Chapman, in 1952. The Company's first factory was in old stables behind the Railway Hotel in Hornsea. Team Lotus was active and competitive in Formula One racing from 1958 to 1994. Since the 1960s the company has occupied a modern factory and road test facility at Hethel, near Norwich.

Chapman died of a heart attack in 1982, at the age of 54, having begun life an inn-keeper's son and ended a multi-millionaire industrialist in post-war Britain. The carmaker built tens of thousands of successful racing and road cars and won the Formula One World Championship seven times.

In 1986 the company was bought by General Motors. On August 27, 1993, GM sold the company, for £30 million, to A.C.B.N. Holdings S.A. of Luxembourg, a company controlled by Italian businessman Romano Artioli, who also owned Bugatti Automobili SpA. In 1996 a majority share in Lotus was sold to Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional Bhd (Proton), a Malaysian car company listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.

The company also acts as an engineering consultancy, performing development - particularly of suspension - for other car manufacturers.

As of 2005 the Malaysian company Proton organised Lotus as Group Lotus, divided into Lotus Cars and Lotus Engineering. A Formula One team is in the works, according to rumour.#redirect

Contents

Formula One

Main article: Team Lotus
Hot Rod magazine cover showing Lotus Turbine Indy car
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Hot Rod magazine cover showing Lotus Turbine Indy car

The company encouraged its customers to race its cars, and itself entered Formula One as a team in 1958. A Lotus Formula One car driven by Stirling Moss won the first Grand Prix for the marque in 1960. Major success came in 1963 with the Lotus 25, which - with Jim Clark driving - won Lotus its first F1 World Championship. Clark's untimely death - he crashed driving a Formula Two Lotus 48 in March 1968 after his rear tyre failed in a turn - was a severe blow to the team and to Formula One. He was the dominant driver in the dominant car, and remains an inseparable part of Lotus's early years. That year's championship was won by Clark's Lotus team-mate, Graham Hill.

Lotus is credited with establishing the mid-engine configuration as the best design for formula 1 and Indy cars, with developing the first monocoque Formula 1 chassis, and the integration of the engine and transaxle as chassis components. Lotus also was first with adding wings to Formula 1 cars to add downforce, as well as moving radiators to the sides in F1 cars to aid in aerodynamic performance, and inventing active suspension.

Lotus 77
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Lotus 77

Even after Chapman's death, until the late 1980s, Lotus continued to be a major player in Formula One. Ayrton Senna drove for the Lotus team from 1985 to 1987, winning twice in each year and achieving 17 pole positions. However, by the company's last Formula One race in 1994 the cars were no longer very competitive. During the Formula 1 years Lotus won a total of 79 Grand Prix races. During his lifetime Chapman saw Lotus beat Ferrari as the first team to achieve 50 Grand Prix victories, despite Ferrari having won their first Formula 1 race nine years before Lotus won their own first GP victory.

Formula One driver's world championships:

Lotus models

Previous

Cover of Road & Track magazine, showing Lotus Eleven
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Cover of Road & Track magazine, showing Lotus Eleven

Lotus Europa S2
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Lotus Europa S2

Current

The Lotus Elise
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The Lotus Elise

Lotus Europa S
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Lotus Europa S

The Lotus Europa S follows the core Lotus philosophy of performance through light weight, obtained through the clever use of advanced and high-technology materials, including an extruded and bonded aluminium chassis, composite body panels and a very advanced composite energy-absorbing front crash structure.

Collaborations

When Vauxhall unveiled its new slant-four engine at the 1967 Earls Court Motor Show its bore centres were exactly the same as those proposed by Lotus. Colin Chapman immediately negotiated a deal with Vauxhall to buy some of their cast-iron blocks so that development of Lotus’ own aluminium cylinder head could be speeded up to produce the 9xx series engine used in the Eclat, Excel, Sunbeam and Esprit.

Lotus Engineering

The APX is an aluminium concept vehicle revealed at the 2006 Geneva Motor Show built on Lotus Engineering's Versatile Vehicle Architecture (or VVA for short).

Whereas the VVA technology will be used in the creation of a new mid-engined sportscar for Lotus cars, the APX is in fact a high performance 7 seat MPV with four-wheel drive and a front mounted V6 engine from Lotus Engineering's powertrain division.

Further reading

External links

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